Experimental Cookery Tuesday #4: Prawns and Avocado with a Marie Rose sauce

Or: Steph/ven's Trilogy of Fish, Part Three

I'm aware that it's only Monday. However, as I am on holiday this week, and as I missed a week when I was in France, I elected to use today playing catch-up, and also knocking off the last of the three fish dishes.

This week was prawns.

Now, I first had prawns almost exactly ten years ago, when they were served as part of a hibachi platter at the hotel restaurant I was visiting while on a business trip. Since I had ordered the platter, since the company was paying, and since there wasn't really any alternative, I ate them. (The main meat of the platter was chicken; the prawns, like the salad, were extras.) But the thing is that prawns, like calamari, are actually on my list of acceptable seafood. I tend not to seek them out (since that would be insane), but I won't object to them. So, when Jamie said I was to have prawns this week, I wasn't too dismayed, despite my aversion to fish.

Anyway, you know the deal by now. The recipe this week was quite cheap (fish - cheaper than meat; avocado - fruit, so not too expensive; and a bunch of common items, most of which I already had). Only the whisky part of the equation was expensive, but here I plumped for a cheap and nasty blended whisky (Grants, if you're interested). Our VP (who knows this stuff) would call this sacrilege, and I'd agree with him, since it's not very nice, but since it's for cooking, the good stuff would just be a waste.

This recipe was actually not terribly fiddly - I started my preparations at 5, cooked, ate, and cleaned things away (didn't do the washing up), and then started this post at 5:30, which is pretty good going.

And the taste? Well, mid-way through the recipe it says to test the sauce, and when I did it was just foul. Awful stuff. I thought this would be a huge rant about the evil lurking in marie rose sauce.

But something changed when the whole thing was put together. Perhaps it's that the sauce was diluted by everything else. Perhaps it just needed to sit for a few minutes. Or perhaps it just wasn't as bad as I expected. Because the meal I ate was very nice indeed. A bit on the light side (and no carbs that I could discern), but very nice.

Would I have this again? Absolutely. It needs some sort of light pudding or dessert to go with it, but the meal itself is absolutely fine.

So, that's 3-1 to Jamie. And, what's more, he might actually manage to change my mind about fish during this experiment! So, I have to hand it to him: he clearly knows his stuff. (And, since I'm now a convert, here's a link to the book in question, which Amazon seem to have at 60% off.)

Next up is "Chicken and Leek Stroganoff", which I will be trying tomorrow. I'm actually looking forward to it, despite the recipe requiring me to go and buy another of my culinary nemeses: butter.